Very basic problem importing tiff images with alpha

So, i need to touch up some stop motion footage, and for that purpose, I made a first chroma keying pass in AE, and then exported a tiff sequence, for me to finish up in PS.

Now, whenever I import the images to PS as a sequence, there is no alpha. Just a big black background, and a plain RGB sequence.

Whenever I import each image individually, I get an RGBA image, but i still see the black background, and for the life of me, i just want to import a transparent image and see a transparent image. What am I missing? This is really getting on my nerves today.

That is expected behaviour. A tiff does not officially support transparency (Photoshop introduced a multi-layered tiff format at some point), but does support alpha channels. This alpha channel is present in the channel palette, and can be used to generate a layer mask, for example.

A PNG file supports true transparency. In this case the transparency is not saved as an alpha channel, but as transparency in the pixels bits. (As far as I know.)

In Photoline a tiff with an alpha channel is loaded up as a two layer file, with the alpha channel layer at the top of the layer stack, and hidden. By activating it as a clipping mask, the background becomes "transparent".

It depends a bit on the software used how a tiff's alpha channel is treated. And tiff files can contain more than one alpha channel.